Transition to digital broadcasting satellite TV industry has a huge boost as consumers replace their old analog TV sets to take full advantage of the new high definition signals. But with the United States and other countries switch overs completed in 2009, and the whole world soon to follow, the manufacturer tries to find a new reason for consumers to buy a TV.

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Toshiba announced that one of the most ambitious of these efforts, Cell TV, which will be available in the U.S. later this year. Kit built around the Cell processor, which is now known as the heart of Sony’s Playstation 3 game console.

When Sony, Toshiba and IBM formed a consortium known as the IMS in 2001 to develop the Cell processor, it was thought that Cell will find its way into many consumer multimedia applications.

Features Cell-general purpose processors with up to 8 special purpose cores, which can all run in parallel. This special purpose core is designed to overcome the kind of high-speed calculations necessary for the processing of video and audio in real time, but it has taken years longer than expected to Toshiba to use this computing power on television, partly because it does not “t convince a statement that all that require the processing power – more than a hundred times more energy than that available in the digital television standard.